Industry

Premium grocery stores

Location

Sydney, Australia

Connectors

Zendesk, Google Ecommerce, MySQL, Shopify

Results

2x

Increase in repeat orders

Harris Farm Markets was established in 1971, and today is one of Australia’s largest grocery chains with 24 locations around the country. In 2013, this family-owned business expanded, adding an online grocery shopping and delivery service. In spite of entering this market much later than its competitors, Harris Farm Markets has thrived in the space. James Kerridge, Online Operations Manager, credits their secret weapon: using data to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

In an industry saturated by rewards cards and loyalty points, James holds an unconventional viewpoint. “Rather than ‘frequent flier’ points, we believe the best loyalty program is a great customer experience,” James says. “Week after week and month after month, word of mouth is our main referral source. We increase it by using data to learn how to create the best possible customer experience.”

James Kerridge, Online Operations Manager

“RJMetrics is helping us combine net promoter score data with purchase history data. We're learning exactly what customer interactions lead to happy, and unhappy, customers—exactly the type of insights we need in a customer-centric online industry.”

Measuring Net Promoter Score

From Day One of its online expansion, the company started measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) to identify the customer interactions that lead to happy customers. While the survey was great for surfacing issues, there were two problems:

Double votes were leading to unreliable data

Disparate data sets made follow up actions difficult. The survey data was completely separate from order history, giving Harris Farm Markets no way to take action on the issues, good and bad, customers were telling them about.

James was frustrated: “We couldn’t ID the customer or the order, so we didn’t know where the delivery was made, who the delivery driver was, or who prepared it for the customer. We were crunching a few numbers in Excel, but it made finding actionable information extremely time-consuming.”

Using NPS + RJMetrics to Drive Action

Resolving individual customer issues

Harris Farm Markets was able to solve this problem by using RJMetrics to join all of their disparate data sources -- survey, CRM, AWS tables, Zendesk, and Google Ecommerce -- into one central data warehouse. Now a single customer survey was rich with actionable information.

The result was a new workflow that allowed Harris Farm Markets to take meaningful action on customer feedback. If a customer rates their experience a 0-6, RJMetrics syncs this survey data with Zendesk. Zendesk then triggers an email response to take the next step in resolving the issue.

Making ongoing operational improvements

One level up from solving individual customer issues, this data is also used to make continuous improvements to the customer experience at the store level. James built RJMetrics dashboards that break down this data by store and send a weekly NPS report to the four stores responsible for preparing online grocery delivery orders. The store managers then use this information to improve operations.

But improving the customer experience isn’t the job of store managers only—this data is also used to make decisions about budget allocation. The team categorized the reasons behind low scores. One of the biggest problems? Some customers were receiving the wrong products. The team quickly rallied around the problem, investing in an app and scanners for their in-store personal shopping teams to ensure they don’t pick the wrong product, solving this problem at a macro level.

The Results

This constant attention to improving customer satisfaction has paid off. From Q1 of 2014 to Q1 of 2015, the number of new customers acquired increased by 51% and the number of customers placing repeat orders saw a massive 2x improvement.

With workflows in place to automate customer feedback and action loops, the team is expanding its focus to customer acquisition efforts. Early in 2015, the team used RJMetrics to segment orders by post code. They identified that two out of the hundreds of post codes they service in Sydney account for more than 10% of revenue.

They used this information to target their customer acquisition efforts, placing flyers in the stores in the top two postcode areas. This very affordable marketing strategy paid off. “The ability to better target our efforts has led to a significant increase in sales, with lower marketing spend,” said James.

RJMetrics makes it easy to explore your data in an intuitive interface backed up by a lightning fast cache.

What’s Next

James remains confident that data will continue to help them hit their customer experience goals. With access to all of its data in one place, Harris Farm Markets is wasting no time in finding the answers it needs to position its customer satisfaction ahead of the rest.